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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Thoughts on this week&apos;s readings',
	'<{subtitle}>' => 'Written in <span title="Introduction to Philosophy">PHIL 1402</span> by <a href="https://y.st./">Alex Yst</a>, finalised on 2018-07-18',
	'<{copyright year}>' => '2018',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<h2>The passing on of culture</h2>
<p>
	I don&apos;t see a lot of the things described by Burnyeat, but his observations explain a lot about why I am how I am.
	My siblings and I never really got inducted into the culture of the area.
	We&apos;ve always had very different values and morals.
	Unlike the majority, we actually care about people and society as a whole, not just our friends and family.
	We each want to fix the world in some way, while others would rather just go with the flow.
	So why is that?
</p>
<p>
	Burnyeat explains that the values and beliefs of a culture are passed on at pubs and cafés (Burnyeat, 1997).
	His recital of Plato&apos;s teachings also shows us that in ancient Grease, culture was passed on around mealtime.
	It was during and after a meal that values would be passed on, often through entertainment such as poetry and storytelling.
</p>
<p>
	Now flash ahead to the more-recent past, my childhood.
	We almost never ate out.
	We were impoverished, we couldn&apos;t afford it.
	Yet somehow, my mother thought it would be a good idea to have seven children.
	She settled on four after the fourth pregnancy nearly killed her, but still, four children is too many, especially for a poor family.
	We also didn&apos;t really eat together as a family.
	She didn&apos;t like my father, so she spent as much time out of the house as possible.
	As children, we tended to eat alone; not even in the company of each other.
	There wasn&apos;t any reason to.
	We&apos;d eat when we were hungry.
	(We may have been poor, but the cupboards were always well-stocked with good food to eat, bought at discount prices, but just as nourishing.
	We were never starved.)
	The usage of so much money on gasoline by my mother contributed to the lack of funds for eating out as well.
	That aside, between not eating in the company of others and not eating in the company of each other, there weren&apos;t any real chances to pass culture on during meals.
	We were exposed to culture all the time, but I guess something in the human mind might keep it from sticking if meals aren&apos;t involved.
</p>
<p>
	Much to the frustration of my mother, her children aren&apos;t a part of the same culture that she is.
	We each found our own cultures.
	I&apos;m a part of free culture.
	Being un-inducted into the common culture of family-serving and blind following of society, including the supporting of corporations that seek to milk us for all we&apos;re worth, I found a culture that serves humanity as a whole and promotes creativity and learning.
	My eldest sibling join a volunteer organisation, and found a rare culture that seeks equality and support for the less-well-off.
	My next sibling ...
	Well, it can be weeks before they&apos;re respond to my emails.
	I&apos;m not sure what culture they&apos;ve found for themself, but it&apos;s clear they&apos;re not a part of the family-above-all culture my mother was a part of before growing to hate my father.
	My youngest sibling still lives with my mother.
	My mother&apos;s gone from absent to overbearing, perhaps to try to make up for lost time, so my youngest sibling isn&apos;t able to show who they are yet.
	It&apos;s known that they&apos;re one of the three of us that currently doesn&apos;t want children though.
	Clearly, they&apos;re not a part of the family-above-all culture.
	It&apos;s funny, too.
	My mother once told my oldest sibling to never have children.
	She said it out of anger, as an attack; saying my eldest sibling was terrible and shouldn&apos;t pass that on.
	But my eldest sibling doesn&apos;t want children anyway, like the youngest and me, and replied as such.
	My mother reacted like she&apos;d been kicked in the teeth.
	She took it as an insult that one of her own children wouldn&apos;t want children of their own.
	My eldest sibling was taking her advice, and my mother was insulted!
	Anyway, it&apos;s clear we didn&apos;t absorb our mother&apos;s culture, nor the common culture around us.
	I&apos;d never realised it, but this lack of sharing meals may have been what saved us.
</p>
<h2>Plato&apos;s cities</h2>
<p>
	Plato&apos;s simple ideal city doesn&apos;t make much sense.
	Citizens are required to take a position assigned to them based on their most productive skills.
	However, there is no government.
	Without a government, who is assigning the jobs?
	Who is judging what skills are most productive?
	What one person calls productive, another calls a foolish waste of time.
	All needs are met by the city, but by who?
	Again, this sounds like government distribution of items needed for basic life, but without the government there to actually do it.
	So how does it get done?
	There&apos;s no competition between citizens.
	That means no free market.
	When multiple citizens perform the same job, what keeps the people from choosing the person that does the job better?
	(Surely there are more citizens than jobs, given that the jobs must be simple, as the city lives a simple life.)
</p>
<p>
	The next city is at least self-consistent, though it goes against most of the big ideal of my society, and even against my own ideas, which differ substantially from those of local society.
	It&apos;s an aristocracy, in which those with the power rule over us all.
	In a way, it&apos;s actually very much like my country though.
	We do have a ruling class: the corporation executives.
	Big corporations bribe politicians, and while most people ignore it, the simple fact is that the government here is a puppet to said corporations.
	It&apos;s not the majority that&apos;s in charge here.
	It&apos;s the rich and powerful, who control the general populace both directly through the government and indirectly through their control of media.
	The main difference between this and Plato&apos;s vision is that in Plato&apos;s vision, the aristocracy does right by the people.
	But nothing keeps the benevolent aristocracy from degrading into something similar to what we have in my country today (Levin, 2012).
	In time, Plato&apos;s second city would become like any other city or country led by a powerful one or few.
	It won&apos;t always be the philosophers running the city; eventually it will be the greedy, pretending to have our best interests at heart.
</p>
<p>
	Like I said, our society is run by the greedy, whose greatest desire is profit.
	Plato&apos;s second city though is run by philosophers who think there is an ultimate good and that they are serving it through their leadership.
	After a lifetime of brainwashing, a dictator is chosen that carries on the traditions and rules of the city, leading the city ever onward, yet ever the same.
	These entirely different motives, though leading to similar qualities in some respects, lead to very different outcomes in other respects.
</p>
<p>
	The main thing I noticed we don&apos;t have in our society that would come from Plato&apos;s second city is government-managed breeding.
	As I mentioned, the corporations are controlling the government.
	Unmanaged breeding doesn&apos;t pose a threat to the corporations, and actually provides them with more future customers to brainwash.
	Even if the corporations <strong>*could*</strong> institute such a system, which I have a hard time believing they could manage, they&apos;d be doing themselves more harm than good.
	I digress though.
	While I think Plato&apos;s second city would devolve into what we see around us today in my country, my country was never like Plato&apos;s second city.
	The alternate origins have led to some differences, such as citizens being free to breed as they choose to.
	To start a family or not and, if so, with whom, is up to each individual to decide.
	With unmanaged breeding, we also don&apos;t separate family units except when particularly unhealthy.
	Again, part of this is due to the origin of our society, and part due to who pulls the strings.
	The corporations control society through manipulative means.
	They&apos;re not <strong>*officially*</strong> our leaders.
	As such, they&apos;d need to convince us we want family units dissolved and make us think we&apos;d chosen it ourselves.
	It&apos;s not profitable for them, and it&apos;s a waste of their time and resources to do even attempt this.
	They don&apos;t need to promote loyalty to the city; instead they promote brand loyalty.
	So it the breaking up of family units doesn&apos;t happen.
	Plato&apos;s idea of the governing class is that they are to avoid owning property, as property ownership can lead to corruption; the same corruption we see in our own rulers, both official (government officials) and unofficial (the corporation owners that pull the strings of the government through the corrupt officials).
</p>
<p>
	Indoctrination is an important component in Plato&apos;s second city (Levin, 2012).
	And it&apos;s an important component in today&apos;s society too.
	We&apos;re made to believe the corporations and government are good.
	Supposedly, the government runs things on behalf of all people, not just the wealthy that can afford to bribe politicians.
	Censorship is prevalent in both societies as well, though caused by different motives.
	In Plato&apos;s city, censorship prevents the spread of free ideas to avoid people coming to the realisation that the guardians might be anything other than good.
	It also extinguishes any mention of rebellion (Levin, 2012).
	On the other hand, censorship in today&apos;s society usually revolves around money-making.
	Copyright, for example, is the most common form of censorship in my country, yet it&apos;s one almost no one recognises as censorship because we&apos;ve been indoctrinated into a culture that believes ideas can somehow be owned.
	Because of an issue entirely unrelated to copyright, I&apos;m currently being censored by this very university; the school didn&apos;t like how I was using my free speech and threatened to expel me if I didn&apos;t comply with their censorship demands.
	Non-disclosure agreements used by businesses are another form of censorship.
	The fact is that censorship is used much more widely in today&apos;s society that people usually recognise.
	It&apos;s not all obvious stuff such as the Great Firewall of China.
</p>
<p>
	One aspect in which our society differs from Plato&apos;s second city is the treatment of chronic illness.
	Plato&apos;s society treats only those that can be mended quickly and effectively.
	Chronic illness, including both in the ill-born and in the elderly, is not treated.
	In fact, the guardians can authorise for people to be put down if treatment is to be denied (Levin, 2012).
	On the other hand, corporations run the medical trade in our society.
	The chronically-ill are a cash cow.
	Sometimes even when a cure exists, it&apos;ll be kept secret so treatment can remain ongoing, costing patients much more money.
	A lifetime of cancer treatment brings in much more money for a pharmaceutical company than a cure that a patient can take a few doses of, then be done with forever.
</p>
<p>
	While I disagree with Plato in that either of his cities are the utopia he imagines them to be, I&apos;ve got to give him credit for seeing that neither city would actually work out for long.
	In the first, human desire for something more than bare sustenance prevents long-term stagnation of the city in its simple state.
	And in the second city, greed wins out over goodness and the &quot;paradise&quot;, if it can even be called that, breaks down into a greed-based oligarchy.
	While I disagree with Plato as to what constitutes a perfect society, it seems we both agree that human greed prevents such a society from coming to fruition.
</p>
<h2>Cave allegory</h2>
<p>
	From what we can see about Plato through what he imagines his perfect cities to be like, we can see that Plato was ignoring things critical to the human experience.
	He couldn&apos;t see certain necessities of life as actually important, and dismissed and wanted to abolish them.
	I almost consider Plato to be a madperson.
	For that reason, I find the insight offered by his cave allegory to be surprising.
	It&apos;s a strikingly on-point representation of how people handle new knowledge.
	Most people are unwilling to accept new knowledge, and those that have accepted it, find it difficult to remember and use their former thought processes from before such knowledge was acquired (Gendler, 2015).
	Once we see the light and finally come to understand it, it&apos;s difficult to see how anyone could fail to see what now seems so obvious to us.
</p>
<h2>Aristotle&apos;s and the Sophists&apos; thoughts on the state</h2>
<p>
	Some of Aristotle&apos;s specific examples are wrong, if you look directly at them.
	For example, he says that humans have speech, unlike any other animal, and it&apos;s proof that it is in our nature to form societies.
	He says nature does nothing by accident, so there must be a reason we&apos;re the only animals that can talk (Zarri, 1948).
	I agree that it&apos;s in our nature to form societies.
	We&apos;re a very social animal, and do best when in very large groups, larger groups than any other animal could form.
	However, speech alone isn&apos;t enough to get the job done.
	In fact, we&apos;re not even the only animals that talk!
	Parrots talk, but with little to no understanding of the meanings behind words.
	Gorillas can be taught to speak and understand sign language, but it&apos;s not actually in their nature to do so, so they don&apos;t do it outside captivity.
	It&apos;s widely believed that whales communicate with one another via a form of language that we&apos;re yet to decipher, yet they don&apos;t go on to build cities.
	Secondly, we have good evidence that nature does <strong>*everything*</strong> by accident, through a process of trial and error.
	It&apos;s called natural selection.
	If you have enough mutations, one of them will be advantageous.
	We call these positive mutations adaptations, but they&apos;re not actually planned; they&apos;re accidents that worked out.
	The ones that are disadvantageous are weeded out after creation, so they don&apos;t spread.
	With positive mutations getting spread to the next generation and negative mutations getting weeded out, it&apos;s easy to fall victim to the illusion that this is all planned out to the most minute detail, but it&apos;s actually all accidents.
	If nature does nothing in vain though, then why do whales have hip bones, despite having no legs?
</p>
<p>
	The Sophists had another idea of how the state came to be.
	They thought the state was erected to solve specific problems, and that by nature, humans are actually asocial (Zarri, 1948).
	Today, we don&apos;t see this, so it seems implausible.
	However, it&apos;s worth noting that these views aren&apos;t mutually exclusive.
	Like I said, nature does <strong>*everything*</strong> by accident.
	What if a mutation caused some humans to be a bit less asocial than others?
	These humans formed a state because it was in their nature.
	These humans prospered, while the more asocial humans didn&apos;t and died out.
	As time went on, being social and being part of the state became more advantageous, and humans that left society were less likely to survive.
	Because of this, humans evolved to become more and more social.
	In other words, in the past, humans may not have been so social, but in the modern day, we&apos;re the most social animals on the planet.
	That said, I don&apos;t think I believe the Sophists&apos; view on this.
	I think we were likely social animals long before we formed states, or even villages.
	If we look at other apes (humans are a species of ape (Wikipedia, 2018)), we see even without the formation of full states, apes tend to live in large groups; they&apos;re almost living in villages, but without the houses.
	Apes, including humans, are social animals.
</p>
<h2>Combining reason and faith</h2>
<p>
	Too many supporters of faith abandon reason.
	Reason involves what we can see, experience, know, and deduce.
	It forms the basis of all meaningful knowledge.
	Faith, on the other hand, is belief in the unknowable.
	By definition, we can&apos;t know it!
	As such, faith is no substitute for reason.
	If your faith goes against reason, your faith is verifiability wrong.
	On the other hand, if you can reconcile and combine faith with reason, the two can exist in harmony.
	I&apos;m not a Christian myself, but I can appreciate the work Saint Thomas Aquinas put in to combine reason with the Christian faith.
	It&apos;s a shame his work was rejected by the church at first, despite how it supported the church, but at least they understood the good they did for him in the end (Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2006).
	If Christianity is to be one of the dominant religions of of the world today, it should have a firm foundation set in reason, not discard reason as irrelevant.
</p>
<div class="APA_references">
	<h2>References:</h2>
	<p>
		Burnyeat, M. F. (1997, December 10). Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic. Retrieved from <a href="https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/b/Burnyeat99.pdf"><code>https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/b/Burnyeat99.pdf</code></a>
	</p>
	<p>
		Constitutional Rights Foundation, A. (2006). BRIA 22 4 c St. Thomas Aquinas Natural Law and the Common Good - Constitutional Rights Foundation. Retrieved from <a href="http://crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-22-4-c-st-thomas-aquinas-natural-law-and-the-common-good"><code>http://crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-22-4-c-st-thomas-aquinas-natural-law-and-the-common-good</code></a>
	</p>
	<p>
		Gendler, A. (2015, March 17). Plato&apos;s Allegory of the Cave - Alex Gendler. Retrieved from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RWOpQXTltA"><code>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RWOpQXTltA</code></a>
	</p>
	<p>
		Levin, M. R. (2012). Plato&apos;s Republic and the Perfect Society. Retrieved from <a href="https://academic.udayton.edu/LawrenceUlrich/Leadership370/Plato%27s%20Republic%20and%20The%20Perfect%20Society.pdf"><code>https://academic.udayton.edu/LawrenceUlrich/Leadership370/Plato%27s%20Republic%20and%20The%20Perfect%20Society.pdf</code></a>
	</p>
	<p>
		Wikipedia. (2018, July 5). Human - Wikipedia. Retrieved from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human"><code>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human</code></a>
	</p>
	<p>
		Zarri, J. (1948, July 16). Aristotle&apos;s Theory of the Origin of the State. Retrieved from <a href="http://scholardarity.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Aristotles-Theory-of-the-Origin-of-the-State-DRAFT-2-PDF.pdf"><code>http://scholardarity.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Aristotles-Theory-of-the-Origin-of-the-State-DRAFT-2-PDF.pdf</code></a>
	</p>
</div>
END
);
